The new plugin makes it possible to apply more than a thousand high-quality photographic effects.

Topaz Labs has without doubt one of the largest lineups of Photoshop plugins, covering everything from sharpening, removing noise and minimizing JPEG artifacts, through masking imagery, and on to its black-and-white and lens effects products. In fact, there are now 13 of these, all with modest prices.

The latest is ReStyle, which provides users with the ability to add a wide variety of one-click effects to their photographs. Your first reaction to this might well be, "So what?" And that would be justified, given the large number of existing programs and plugins devoted to adding effects to images. So what distinguishes this from its competitors?

Topaz tells us that ReStyle employs a "cutting-edge process of mapping color and tone statistics from a selected style to a target image," which results in high-quality transformations. It also employs a new method for creating styles and presets, which reads the colors and tones of the source image and creates a preset for later use. Blending modes have been incorporated into the adjustment modules, providing eight different looks for each style preset. In addition, each of the selected style’s five dominant colors can be adjusted using hue, saturation and luminance controls. Each adjustment tab provides access to a masking module that includes a set of tools, such as an edge-aware brush, gradient mask, smart feather tool and color aware tool.

Topaz ReStyle 1 for Mac and Windows Photoshop CS4-CC, Elements 6-11, Aperture, Lightroom and iPhoto can be purchased for $29.99 on the Topaz Labs site until August 31 (regularly $59.99). A trial version is also available for download.